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Eyehategod – Eyehategod

After a long fourteen year gap since the release of Confederacy of Ruined Lives, Eyehategod are back with their new self titled fifth full length. Serving up another dose of filthy bluesy sickness, it’s another fantastic album from the NOLA metal crazies.

Sludgy, bluesy riffs abound, drenched in feedback from the word go, they lose no time assaulting your ears with a filthy dirty sound on opener Agitation! Propaganda! The gnarliest of bass tones rumbles away while the late Joe LaCaze (who unfortunately died after this album was recorded) put in a great performance behind the sticks, symbol crashes and energetic fills aplenty. The vocals are really intense, with Mark Williams vocals the perfect combination of pissed off and tortured – his vocals absolutely shred your eardrums. Catchy, almost bouncy sludgy riffs are delivered one after another throughout the album, and with the filthy, dense guitar tone, each riff is fantastically heavy and makes you want to get up and smash everything, and the guitar feedback over it adds to the raw aggression. The bluesy nature of the guitar playing mixed with the huge guitar tone and pure aggression coming from the vocals, make this one angry, pissed off beast of an album.

Parish Motel Sickness and Quitters Offensive are great songs, with their Black Sabbath riffs gone wrong, taking the doomy riff approach and making them infinitely more heavy, gloomy and messed up. Like the original doomsters, most songs are filled with great memorable riffs, each one grabbing you by the throat, before throwing you into the next one. The best track here is Nobody Told Me with the best fat chunky riffs the band has to offer, particularly incisive vocals, crazy drum smashes and groovy bass, each riff flows into the next sublimely , and that speedy section near the end is as headbang inducing as anything. Worthless rescue is another shot of bluesy barbarisms, while Framed to the Wall is just pure vitriol and aggression facilitated by fast paced riffs and a dose of groove. Robitussin and Rejection is pretty sick, but doesn’t go quite for the throat as much as the rest, and is one of the weaker ones on the release, but they pick it back up with the slow, sludgy Flags and Cities Bound, another track with fantastically vicious vocals.

Any Eyehategod fan is going to love this, as should any fan of sludge.It’s vicious, filthy, and sick, and infused with a bluesy catchiness that makes the songs as memorable as they are intense. Eyehategod will break your fucking neck with riffs and vocalist Mike Williams will flay the skin from your ears with pure intense vitriol. Perhaps not quite as good as their best release Dopesick, but it’s still a fantastic release, and definitely pushes it close. Get it.